During this affliction I was brought to examine my life
in relation to eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of
health. In this examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward
my fellow creatures as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of
the Church, I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation to
my Redeemer and Saviour the result was different. My returns of gratitude
and loving obedience bear no proportion to my obligations for redeeming,
preserving, and supporting me through the vicissitudes of life from infancy
to old age. The coldness of my love to Him who first loved me and has
done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me; and to complete my unworthy
character, I had not only neglected to improve the grace given to the
extent of my duty and privilege, but for want of improvement had, while
abounding in perplexing care and labor, declined from first zeal and love.
I was confounded, humbled myself, implored mercy, and renewed my covenant
to strive and devote myself unreservedly to the Lord. -- Bishop McKendree
THE preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox -- dogmatically,
inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is
the clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by truth in
its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised against the desolating
floods of honest or reckless misbelief or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear
and hard as crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter well-shaped,
well-named, and well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead
as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study,
or to pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may be
scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutia of the derivation
and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter into its perfect
pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be illumined, may study it
as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his brief or to defend his case,
and yet be like a frost, a killing frost. Letter-preaching may be eloquent,
enameled with poetry and rhetoric, sprinkled with prayer spiced with sensation,
illumined by genius and yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings,
the rare and beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which
kills may be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or
feeling, clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with style
irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of study, graced neither
by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching how wide and utter
the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and not
the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It has no deep
insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word. It is true
to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must be broken and penetrated
for the kernel. The letter may be dressed so as to attract and be fashionable,
but the attraction is not toward God nor is the fashion for heaven. The
failure is in the preacher. God has not made him. He has never been in the
hands of God like clay in the hands of the potter. He has been busy about
the sermon, its thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but
the deep things of God have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced
by him. He has never stood before "the throne high and lifted up,"
never heard the seraphim song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush of
that awful holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair under the
sense of weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed, his heart touched,
purged, inflamed by the live coal from God's altar. His ministry may draw
people to him, to the Church, to the form and ceremony; but no true drawings
to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion induced. The Church has been frescoed
but not edified, pleased but not sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill
is on the summer air; the soil is baked. The city of our God becomes the
city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise
and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching
have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher
creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble
in life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired prayer as a conspicuous
and largely prevailing element in his own character has shorn his preaching
of its distinctive life-giving power. Professional praying there is and
will be, but professional praying helps the preaching to its deadly work.
Professional praying chills and kills both preaching and praying. Much of
the lax devotion and lazy, irreverent attitudes in congregational praying
are attributable to professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive,
dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart,
they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing
prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath.
The deader they are the longer they grow. A plea for short praying, live
praying, real heart praying, praying by the Holy Spirit -- direct, specific,
ardent, simple, unctuous in the pulpit -- is in order. A school to teach
preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to
true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to kill?
Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all worlds,
the Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what sincerity! what
truth in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must be! How hearty!
Prayer to God the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort of man, the most
real thing! Shall we not discard forever accursed preaching that kills and
prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the mightiest thing -- prayerful
praying, life-creating preaching, bring the mightiest force to bear on heaven
and earth and draw on God's exhaustless and open treasure for the need and
beggary of man? < |